In a rapidly evolving title insurance and real estate industry status quo, stakeholders stand on the cusp of a transformative era driven by artificial intelligence (AI). In many ways, they are already in that era.
Marty Frame, president of Williston Financial Group (WFG) subsidiary MyHome, shared thoughts on the matter as part of the recent first WFG Executive Summit.
“Essentially, the model is to take massive sets of data from all over the place, do the best job putting them together, and use that data to direct the destiny of corporations, nations, wars, you name it,” Frame told attendees. “All kinds of incredible things are being done through data analysis. And yet, still ’there’s a step missing, which is the ability to become, I don’t want to call it sentient because I’m not that kind of futurist, but to learn, for the model to learn from itself and to be able to predict and take its next steps on its own.
“That’s where the arena of machine learning comes in. And ultimately, machine learning, I think, is the closest sort of progenitor to what we think of as generative AI. And so generative AI, which is where we are right now in terms of technology development, is really simply the process of developing a model which can learn from its own inputs, develop new inputs to itself and do new things based on what you put into it.”
Frame referenced large data analytical firms including Denver-based Palantir Technologies, emphasizing, “The more data you infuse into a model, the smarter the model gets.”
This phase, he said, is instrumental in shaping data-driven strategies for corporations and institutions.
AI’s potential in carrying out cybercrimes as well as its ability to improve customer experiences were laid out by Frame, stressing the need for businesses to walk a fine line of balancing technological advancement and security.
Multiple government agencies have tracked real estate fraud’s rise and the$446 million in resulting annual financial losses as of last year.
“There are some really, really powerful technologies, not just in the ChatGPT world, coming out of companies like OpenAI now. This video is 100 percent AI generated,” Frame said, referencing a clip just shown to the audience. “These people are not real. The prompt that was used to develop this video was two professional women sitting for a media interview. They don’t exist. Think of the fraud implications of this kind of technology among other things, all the power of it to the good and to the less good. You see these kind of bots sitting on the front end of websites. And the goal of these kinds of things, and they exist not just in websites, is to use a knowledge base and to predict and sort of preempt from a customer service perspective what it is your question’s going to be.”
Frame provided a historical perspective on AI’s evolution within the industry and how early offerings paved the way for remote process analysis (RPA).
“RPA was sort of an adapted form of a bot, right?” he asked. “It’s a more complex set of business rules. If a set of things occur, then do another set of things. From there, one of the more interesting leaps evolutionarily was toward computer vision and big data. Computer vision is just a way of saying we’ve trained cameras or imaging equipment to recognize certain patterns, and if you show a camera a pattern often enough, it’s going to start to recognize things that fall within that pattern.”
In regard to title industry-specific AI applications, Frame delved into:
- Document AI: Frame said the technology revolutionized document processing at MyHome. By analyzing thousands of document types in Maricopa County, Ariz., AI enabled the swift separation of documents, saving substantial time per transaction.
- Process AI: DecisionPoint, an automated clear-to-close system, evolved beyond its initial function to streamline various elements of the production process. Frame highlighted a 12 percent reduction in time and costs, a testament to the power of AI-driven process optimization.
- Marketing AI: MyHome’s December acquisition of Volly, a marketing automation company, aimed to showcase the company’s content generation and distribution using AI engines. This approach tailors content intelligently for customer acquisition and portfolio retention, earning accolades for its innovation.
- Customer service AI: MyHome uses AI to integrate text and content extraction. Positive feedback is harnessed to boost visibility on platforms like Google and Facebook.
“We analyzed all the documents, thousands and thousands of types of documents, many tens of thousands of examples of those documents in Maricopa,” Frame said. “We became smart about those document types and what we wanted to do and deployed those two, separating documents in a buyer-seller and buyer and seller closing packages. And in just this one simple gesture, saved 30 minutes per transaction. One deal, 30 minutes. Imagine all the other places in an enterprise like ours and an enterprise like yours where you’re dealing with documents and you want to know if you’re paginated correctly, if you’ve got signatures in the right place, if you are abstracting, how you abstract, all that kind of stuff.
“The important thing in this technology is that it’s private because you cannot put ChatGPT to work on that because it’s a public model.”
Frame concluded his session by urging industry peers to share their AI findings and business stories related to the tech, saying that doing so will create a tighter and more efficient bond among those who can benefit from advancements the most.
“MyHome is all about creating a space where everybody comes together, where information is exchanged, where opportunities to collaborate are created, where documents are passed back and forth, where they get signed, where funds get created,” he said. “It’s essentially the focal point where all the things that we need to do to interact with our customers come together. And you can imagine all the opportunities for automation that exist there.”